Market Potential for ITSM Graduates: A Survey

Abstract

IT Service management is an emerging discipline likely to enhance existing academic IT program offerings. One barrier to adoption of ITSM in IT academic programs is the uncertainty that students can get jobs as a result of such education and knowledge. To overcome this barrier, a survey of the membership of the U.S. IT Service Management Forum, a practitioner organization, was conducted. The results of this survey show that there is a market of at least 15,000 hires per year in the U.S. for undergraduate and graduate students who have ITSM skills, and that companies are willing to hire ITSM-trained graduates.

Keywords:

• IT Service Management
• ITIL
• jobs
• IT academic programs

Acknowledgments

Survey development was conducted with significant input from all of the authors, who have been the core of the ITSMF Academic Forum for the first three years and have been privy to the planning and needs of that organization as a result. We are grateful to ITSMF-USA for their support for this survey. In addition we thank others who worked on the project: Merily Talalla of ITSMF-USA who managed the Web survey and summarized raw results, and Greg Hines of Hines Consulting and Stuart Galup, Florida Atlantic University who commented on early versions of the survey. Finally, but not least, we would like to thank Aileen Cater-Steel and the two anonymous reviewers who helped to shape and improve this work.